If you’re doing QP, the only job is “Generalist”. The knife is a very good generalist weapon, as it’s high crit+weakspot+single target damage allows it to deal with most specialists and elites. Uncanny allows you to deal with heavy armored targets and the mobility allows you to reposition to wherever you are most needed and deal with shooters. It’s natural weaknesses are unyielding and hordes, but you can always build those out elsewhere, especially on zealot. Shroudfield and a nice braced autogun, for example, and no threat will be impossible to deal with alone.
According to the dev blogs, this is intentional design. Every class is able to “clutch up” when needed. This, combined with the very flexible class trees, makes the concept of “jobs” or “roles” a bit moot outside of premade strike teams. Every class can deal with everything in different ways and to different degrees. Hell, I run a frontline focused vet and psyker because I like jumping into the thick of things, and I do well enough on QP Auric Maelstroms.
The Hyper Mobile, Scout-esque playstyle is like krak, addicting and powerful. Hell, I’ve got a knife build on all four classes (even Ogryn) designed to give me that “Gotta Go Fast (Medical Condition)” dopamine hit. While I’m alright with them tweaking numbers to bring it more in line, I agree that actively trying to remove that playstyle outright would be unwise.
…I kinda wish people would stop whining about this. Fatshark has shown they don’t care about this issue. You all have been complaining for probably well over a year about this, and they haven’t done jack. I see more posts about the Combat knife than anything else on this forum. It’s kinda sad.
I would say with heavy attacks on weakpoints, I agree. But with the blessings currently available, being able to light attack carapace to death feels pretty silly. I’m more in the camp of tweaking knife mobility myself.
It took them a year for them to fix an ability bug that they initially claimed was “working as intended” with no indication that they would change it until they did. It took them 2 years and a CM getting sick and another CM picking up the pieces for us to even know that they were looking into redoing the itemisation and crafting. It took them a year to finally make good on a blog post that claimed Darktide’s character progression was totally different to Vermintide 2’s even when at the time the blog was posted it was pointed out repeatedly that it was very obviously not. It took them almost a year to finally admit that what was taken as a bug for that time was allegedly a deliberate but"accidentally" uncommunicated change. There are also a few more times when bugs were claimed to be deliberate design decisions and vice versa, which has made the rousing game of bug-or-feature that we all have been playing since beta much more murky than it needs to be.
The thing is, feedback is working, but Fatshark is only intermittently communicative (at best) about feedback they receive and their dev time scales are geological due to structural and managerial issues, and other business factors like ports having way more priority.
remove acceleration on heavy spam, it doens’t need any resource nor skill, it’s very exploitable.
block stats should be bad, it’s short and light weapon, your main defence is your agility.
Optional: remove block completely, and let knife being able to parry only. Buff mobility stats if it will be needed as a block remove tradeoff.
more thematical things - bleed is ok, but needs more. Something like Poison - chance to cause stun (enemy starts puking). Cut the sinews - slows down enemy move or/and attack speed.
First things any average person will have with knives and daggers - assassins, cunning cutthroats, dirty tricks, agility. Because it’s how it was represented in media, it’s a very intuitive design for such weapon and what people would expect. There is no need to reinvent a wheel.
If you need to find a gap, then your weapon is bad against armor, like that’s why you need a gap. You don’t have gap mechanics in the game, backstab is the thing that simulates it in some sort.
This is true only when basically grappling an opponent, usually once you’ve already gone to the ground with them. Same with half-swording.
When you look at armored combatants fighting each other, a knife slid through a gap in plates isn’t game plan #1, it’s stuff with long reach and an ability to impart impact damage.
Agree on this. @Nish thinks that it needs a nerf, both I would agree even if I think that it can go.
I disagree here as blocking is part of this game.
Anyways, you already have no interest to try to block considering the lack of stamina boost with this weapon and considering how it is better to dodge.
Poison would be cool, but does it suit 40k background?
Ofcourse, like they bomb planets with life-eater virus and stuff. Toxins, viruses, poisons, radiological - everything has its place.
If you want a specific example of mundane weapon - Catachans (same guys that use Devil’s Claw) use poisoned knives, wich makes sense cause they are from the hellish jungle death world, where is the whole fauna and flora extremely hostile.
Clan Escher from Necromunda like toxic wepons a lot. Tho Necromunda is a subsetting(?) almost, but still.
House Escher is the most strikingly different of all of the Clan Houses on Necromunda as their population is almost entirely women. They produce a vast array of exotic pharmaceuticals, from gene-hancing elixirs to luxury drugs to deadly poisons, and the House derives most of its wealth and power from supplying these across the planet
The fighters in Eschergangs are fast, skilful, and deadly. They can field some incredibly flexible gangs too. With access to cheap and reliable lasguns, they can lay down a wall of firepower that will bring down even the hardiest of Goliath gangers. Their stiletto knives and stiletto swords both have the Toxin trait, making it easy to take out enemy fighters regardless of how many wounds they have.
They can also take the ‘Nightshade’ chem-thrower, a weapon unique to Escher gangs. As a Template weapon, it can hit multiple fighters at once, giving you the chance to devastate an enemy gang with a single attack. This lethal weapon also has the Silent trait, so you can take out your foes before they even know you’re there.Escher fighters can also take a chem-synth. This esoteric piece of equipment makes any weapon with the Toxin trait** or Gas trait*** even more potent by reducing the Toughness of your target. Your enemies will think twice before messing with House Escher in the future.
Maybe rending should be changed to brittleness in more weapon instances (not necessarily all). So rather than it being a one-person tool to bypass armour, it becomes more widely useful to the squad.
Obvs brittleness % would be a lot lower than rending %.
anything is boring after a while… exactly why I want new weapons that feel really different.
Tbh, I did not like the boltpistol, but this weapon, shock maul, assault shotgun, the new shovels are incredibly differents from what we had.
Not on combat blade… absolutely not. Brittleness would be good if you consider that the weapon can weaker an armor. A knife cannot do that.
I don’t disagree, it was more a thought in general on rending as a whole.
Still, it’s no more “illogical” than a blunt hammer causing temporary brittleness to a flak jacket, if we’re being pedantic about what things should and shouldn’t be able to do.
Maybe brittleness and rending should be a carapace only debuff? I mean, I don’t think many people care much for the flak effects given we all run with +25% flak on everything. Doesn’t change the game much though, I realise.
theres no reason to slow down cause gunners are a joke i miss the times when they would a kill a braindead guy just standing in the open and running around
Anyways, there is a slight nerf for combat blades. The only thing that was a little too much is the movement on a zealot with daggers.
And as I said in this thread, there is nothing more that can be done about move except the nerf about the move boost when using heavy hit.
But, about damages, clearly combat blades are far behind a lot of weapons. So, except if they put a new balance, then no nerf should be applied on that… this includes carapace.
Reduce knife melee range to be lower than tac axes. That will force players actually to use the weapon’s mobility to enable its damage. It’ll make the weapon far less comfy as it’ll have a logical yet substantial downside that requires genuine skill to make up for. In short, 90% of zealot players will no longer use it and the problem will be solved.
